Four Streets That Say It All.

Brunswick, Gertrude, Smith and Johnston. Each street is a household name in Melbourne’s Inner North, each with its own distinct personality. The role that these strips play for locals of (and visitors to) Fitzroy and Collingwood is evolving all the time. Together, they provide the grandest boulevards of the neighbourhood and create an all-encompassing block that’s just a half-hour loop to experience on foot – notwithstanding any distractions of the eating, drinking or shopping variety.

Since the mid-19th century, the southern end of Brunswick Street has been a humming retail strip. To early European residents of Fitzroy, this felt far flung from the hustle and bustle of the city. For much of this time, Brunswick and Bourke streets were vying for the title of the Melbourne’s ultimate shopping destination.

At the turn of the 20th century, the industrial revolution recast the entire neighbourhood as a place of manufacturing. In turn, its shops began to serve more utilitarian everyday services to meet the needs of Fitzroy’s factory workers. Dozens of pubs met their other, equally vital, needs.

As heavy industry has slowly progressed further out of the city, Brunswick Street has moved through a number of distinct identities. Most indelibly, it was a hotbed for Melbourne’s countercultural revolutions of the 1960s, 70s and beyond. Artists of all mediums and movements called Brunswick and its smaller side streets home.

Walking from Brunswick to Smith? Gertrude. Need a new look for an upcoming event that seems pretty casual but is deceptively très chic? Gertrude. Hunting down a wedding present that says: “I have taste, you have taste, and that’s why we’re friends”? Gertrude.

In the most recent iteration of its very official list, Time Out listed Gertrude as the second coolest street in the world. It’s easy to see why. The Gertrude sensibility is simultaneously global and hyperlocal, like walking down Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Los Angeles or the Thames in Buenos Aires’ Palermo neighbourhood.

Nowhere is this dichotomy louder than in the boutiques along Gertrude. Cult local designers and curators (Handsom, HAVN and The Standard Store, to name a few) happily sit beside premium global brands like Le Labo, Sydney-born Mud and Melbourne-born Aesop.

Smith Street may have one foot in Fitzroy and the other in Collingwood, but – unless you’re an AusPost employee – there’s no real border observed between these two postcodes. Smith Street has a singular identity as a place that’s grungy, laidback and creatively energetic all at once.

Collingwood in particular has a legacy as the historical home of Melbourne’s breweries, once having more than 40 operating in the neighbourhood, including the heritage-listed Yorkshire Brewery – one of the last left standing in the area. Now, Smith Street has become a powerhouse of cultural production. More and more designers, agencies, publishers, galleries, artists, co-working collectives and other creatives of all kinds are increasingly calling this stretch of the neighbourhood home. As happens when places undergo influxes of cool people doing cool things, local spots to eat, drink, shop and experience art invariably become cool, too.

Of these four A-list streets in Fitzroy and Collingwood, Johnston is the one that until recently has often been overlooked. It’s lived many lives, however – at one point as the leading theatre precinct of “suburban” Melbourne, home to both The Regent and The Lyric theatres. These two sites played many roles for successive generations of the 20th century, as vaudevillian theatre made way for the movies, which fell to the talkies, all before bursting into technicolour.

More recently, with both these iconic theatres now gone, Collingwood Yards helps carry the torch as the street’s cultural hub. For many Melburnians, however, Johnston today serves a distinctly functional purpose. It’s a hardworking arterial street for sizeable chunk of city’s traffic cutting either east or west. Even with its steady thrumming of cars, a walk along Johnston Street is good for the soul – and often a necessary part of local life, multiple times a day.